This is a continuation of a post I made in Feb 24 regarding VSL Saxophones and staccatos not playing back correctly. I worked around the problem and moved on. I have had to revisit the piece and am finding other odd behaviours besides the staccato issues.
I have attached a brief part of the piece to illustrate the issue. When there is a “Medium Swing 8ths” set, the longer notes of bar 3 onwards play as short notes. If I remove the swing, the piece plays correctly. The issue does not occur when I use Halion instead of VSL.
Any help as to what is happening, is there a Dorico setting I’m missing or whether this is a bug that’s gone un-noticed would be readily accepted.
I’ve been working through a few significant issues with swing playback. Today, Daniel resolved one of them: a tempo equation was preventing the subsequent swing indication from being recognised. By suppressing playback of the tempo equation, swing now behaves as expected.
Other issues I’ve encountered include:
A slurred articulation combined with a staccato on the final note, which was preventing the following tied notes from sustaining. No solution to this other than removing the staccato and adjusting the played duration of the relevant notes.
On the opposite end, note overlaps causing unintended sustain.
I can share a project tomorrow to illustrate these issues, if you would find this helpful. I am using NotePerformer, but am confident that this is not the problem.
I don’t have any VSL sounds, so I’m unable to reproduce the issue as you describe it, Peter, but if you re-apply the default playback template to the example you’ve attached, I find that everything plays back OK, with no staccato or short notes.
So I guess the issue must be somehow that your expression map is unexpectedly triggering staccato samples.
I can reproduce this on my system. It’s definitely a result of the swing indication, but I can’t tell exactly what is causing the longer notes to clip off.
If you delete all the slurs, it plays back correctly with swing. The duration clipping happens with slurs and swing in the stock VSL Wizard generated Playback Template too. I’m not seeing the keyswitch that’s causing it though …
Thank you for all your replies. As I did previously, I’ve worked around it for now and moved on to another piece, but I will return to it later and try your various suggestions. The problem seems to be rooted in VSL and may be, as Daniel suggested, due to modifications I made to the expression map.
When things calm down a bit, I’ll experiment more and get back.
I did some testing on my end, and when the swing feel is used, I figured out that the “Natural, Note length = Short” entry in the expression map is being used after the first measure, even though the Playing Techniques lane in the Key Editor says that it chose the “Legato, Note length >= Short” option. So, it’s using the Portato medium articulation in the library rather than the legato articulation in the library.
The next question is why this is happening, and I have no idea.
Yes, this is what I had found too when I looked into this back in the Feb 2024 post made by @Peter_Hawkey
At the time it had looked to me like the expression map was configured correctly but was not behaving correctly, only in the case of the swing, and what it showed in the playback techniques lane in the piano roll was different from what it was actually triggering.
It is possible that the note length condition may not be working correctly for some reason when the note lengths are adjusted by the swing. I wonder if this might be related to the way that playing technique regions work when note offsets are used, regarding the timing for the keyswitches.